4um: The Best Rebuttal To The Truthers

Title: The Best Rebuttal To The Truthers
Source: rhymeswithright
URL Source: http://rhymeswithright.mu.nu/archives/229396.php
Published: Jun 15, 2007
Author: rhymeswithright
Post Date: 2007-06-15 09:11:39 by can of corn
Keywords: twoofers, tinfoil, ron paul
Views: 916
Comments: 92

You know, those loons that cannot believe that 9/11 was a terrorist attack and that instead our own government attacked America on 9/11.

No, it isn't an appeal to eyewitnesses, of whom there are many. It isn't an appeal to science, which overwhelmingly demonstrates that the official version is correct. Rather, it is a simple appeal to logic.

[T]o believe in many of these kooky conspiracy theories, you have to believe that tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, FBI agents, and CIA agents all know about an incredibly complex, monstrous plot against the United States, and are keeping their lips sealed while Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, and the fruit loops who think Bush is a puppet of the Freemasons have figured it all out.

So much like the claim that the moon landings all took place in a soundstage, simple reality cannot sustain the conspiracy claims. After all, given the inability of small groups of people to keep small secrets, there is no way that a large group of people could possibly keep "the truth" hidden if 9/11 was a government conspiracy.

I remember my well-read sister excitedly telling me about this in the 70s. It changed the course of the war, but as you say, a well guarded secret for decades.

You really do love those straw men, don't you? I haven't committed myself to any particular theory of what happened on 9/11, merely to the conclusion that the official account of 9/11 is itself so absurd as to be unbelievable. Plenty of alternatives leave the planes hitting the buildings and the hijackers on board the planes.

To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.

Nor do any of the twoofers, because they can't fathom a plausible real life scenario that correlates with their conspiracy fantasies.

It's impossible to know EXACTLY what happened during the building collpases. And people can hear things which SOUND like explosions. And witnesses always have conflicting accounts. And some people will say controversial things just for publicity. Etc. Etc.

The twoofers dwell on such minitia as proof of some kind of conspiracy, but in reality, the conspiracy only exists in their brain addled imaginations.

That our air defense system failed to perform as it always had you think is a piece of minutiae?

You need to formulate your arguments without letting your vile, irrational hatred seep through in the form of childish name calling.

I suggest you read David Ray Griffin's Debunking 9/11 Debunking. I believe he refutes the arguments that appear to be at your link.

No, the link I gave you addresses the rebuttals as well as refuting the original claim.

Is it easier to post a suspicious link to a mass of crap and then say: "If you were to wade through that mess you would see I am right." ?

Those who want to stick their fingers in their ears and go "NAH NAH NAH, I can't hear you, Bush and the Joos did it," and not want to know the truth?

Your loss of control and childish name calling are noted. I think it says something about the strength of your argument.

Because, there are many links within the link I gave adressing all the points, and the arguments are long and detailed, and it's not practical to post them here.

I'm sorry that no Alex Jones' type 30 second sound bite is available. I'm aware that that is what the twoofers normally consider "proof."

You won't read Griffin's book, but you expect me to read the stuff at your link?

And you cannot give us a synopsis that we can check against the sources in the link and rip to shreds.

OK, that really does explain where you are coming from. I suspected this and that is why I made Post #21.

This is a small study in how truly wrong-headed the Ziocon apologists really are. By their own logic, the opposition to "the Truthers" (the opposition being the Ziocons themselves) would be called: "the Liars".

You need to keep obvious hate, anger and silly name calling out of your posts. It makes you sound like an AM radio GOP shill.

You have posted a pile of disorganized crap at a suspicious link and you tell us that if we would only wade through it then you would be proven correct.

When the nonsense of this position is pointed out to you, you begin screaming and hurling cheap insults like a nine year old.

# "It takes about one minute" for the FAA to contact NORAD about a problem plane, after which NORAD can scramble fighter jets “within a matter of minutes” to anywhere in the United States

# A June 1st 2001 change in intercept procedures required all requests for assistance in hijackings to be approved by the Secretary of Defence

# Eye-witness testimony casts doubt on the time NORAD claimed they scrambled jets to intercept Flight 11

# Intercepts of suspect planes normally happen within 10 minutes. Why not on 9/11?

# The hijacked planes should still have been tracked on radar, even if their transponders were turned off

# The many war games and exercises scheduled for 9/11 delayed military response to the hijackings

# Why were fighters not launched from Andrews Air Force Base, closest to Washington?

# General Myers initial story was that no fighters were launched until after the Pentagon was hit

# The 9/11 Commission say that NORAD didn’t recognise the threat from 9/11-type attacks until they happened, but that just isn’t credible

It addresses the implausibility of conspiracy claims for each point as well as the rebuttals made to the debunking of the conspiracy claims.

It should be quite clear that no brief synopsis is available other than the twoofers are full of caca.

"Sixty seven times in the year before 9/11/01 planes were off course and fighter jets responded, so where were the fighter jets on 9/11? It's more than incompetent, it's criminal"

WMV video download (199kB)

Careful planning made this easy to achieve.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction CJCSI 3610.01A (dated 1 June 2001) changed the protocol so that any requests for "potentially lethal support" had to come explicitly from the secretary of defense, leaving commanders in the field unable to respond to hijackings in any meaningful fashion.

Five military exercises were held on 9/11, and this resulted in flight controllers, commanders and pilots being unable to distinguish real world events from exercise scenarios.

Even if a hostile plane was identified it couldn't be fired upon because secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was "out of the loop" during the attacks (as was the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).

Chaos reigned supreme on 9/11 thanks to the above...

WMV video download (177kB)

VOICE TWO: Do we want to think about scrambling aircraft?
VOICE ONE: Oh, God, I don't know.
VOICE TWO: That's a decision somebody's going to have to make probably in the next ten minutes.
VOICE ONE: Oh, you know, everybody just left the room.

...and this effectively stood down the USAF when it was needed most.

Dr. Robert Bowman, a man so decorated with medals and honors they could fill a patriotic Christmas tree, has joined the ranks of those who are declaring that the attacks on 9/11 were an inside job. As right wing world comes tumbling down, more prominent individuals are coming forward with their doubts and concerns with the official report. Some have little more than the powers of their own deduction, others are expert engineers and physicists.

Dr. Bowman has inside knowledge of military protocol, and has stated that it is apparent to him that the massive military exercises that took place on September 11, 2001 were intentionally staged to confuse civil defenses. The person who headed those exercises? None other then Richard Cheney, otherwise known as Dead-eye Dick. [Choice Changes]

"If a stand down order were given it probably would have to come from at least as high as the vice president."

WMV video download (453kB)

9/11 Commission Testimony

There was a young man who came in and said to the vice president "The plane [Flight 77] is 50 miles out" [from Washington], "The plane is 30 miles out", and when it got down to "The plane is 10 miles out" the young man also said to the vice president "Do the orders still stand?", and the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said "Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary?"

WMV video download (1.8 MB)

It is obvious the above orders did not involve defending Washington.

I don't care what particular points are addressed and you know that. You are trying to obfuscate the fact that your silly tactic was exposed.

Use the information to refute the allegations that people have made on this thread. Then source your assertion.

It is routine policy and practice for fighter jets to intercept planes if they go off course even by 2 miles. In the year prior to 9/11 there were 67 such intercepts. It's therefore inconceivable that none of the hijacked planes would be intercepted on 9/11.

In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 1 hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet. Rules in effect back then, and on 9/11, prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts. Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). "Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ," FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM. After 9/11, NORAD and the FAA increased cooperation, setting up hotlines between ATCs and NORAD command centers, according to officials from both agencies. NORAD has also increased its fighter coverage and has installed radar to monitor airspace over the continent.

This issue attracted many comments from other sites, attempting to themselves debunk the Popular Mechanics piece. 911 Research, for instance, referred to this quote by Norad official Major Douglas Martin, who in an AP story said:

"From Sept. 11 to June, NORAD scrambled jets or diverted combat air patrols 462 times, almost seven times as often as the 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001, Martin said".

It is safe to assume that a significant fraction of scrambles lead to intercepts, so the fact that there were 67 scrambles in a 9-month period before 9/11/01 suggests that there are dozens of intercepts per year. To its assertion that there was only one intercept in a decade, the article adds that "rules in effect ... prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts," and the suggestion that there were no hotlines between ATCs and NORAD.

This seems reasonable, until you look more closely, because the primary assertion they are objecting to here is that “there was only one intercept in a decade”. And that’s not what the original piece said: let’s look at the key points again.

In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet

Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). "Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ,"...

So what Popular Mechanics are saying is that there was one intercept of a “civilian plane over North America” in the decade before 9/11, because all other intercepts were offshore. There’s no direct contradiction with the Douglas Martin quote, as he doesn’t say whether the intercepts were offshore or over the continental US.

It’s not just Popular Mechanics saying this, either. The October 2005 edition of “Plane & Pilot” magazine essentially did the same:

Terms like Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) and temporary flight restriction (TFR) quickly came into widespread use among the general-aviation pilot group. Those terms had been around for years. Military fighters and the ADIZ protected American coasts from intrusions by Russian Bear Bombers throughout the Cold War. TFRs were used for presidential security and other extraordinary events. But they weren’t part of a pilot’s everyday life. You didn’t get intercepted and forced down if you flew through a TFR.

Today, things are different. There’s an ADIZ that surrounds Washington, D.C. In the four years after 9/11, it was violated over 1,000 times. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has scrambled fighters for intercepts within U.S. borders over 1,600 times. In the year previous to 9/11, NORAD intercepted airplanes in the ADIZ only 67 times, none of which occurred within the U.S. borders.

The Popular Mechanics claim still seems quite absolute, but then that just means it wouldn’t take much to disprove it. Just find a media report of an intercept, an interview with a pilot who was intercepted when they accidentally flew too close to the White House, anything like that... How difficult can it be? After all, if these 67 scrambles in 9 months were typical, and we’re equating scrambles with intercepts, then that suggests 893 of these events over 10 years. Even if only 10% were intercepts over the continental US, then surely there must be an unquestionable, rock-solid record of one of them, somewhere?

Well, uh, no, it seems not. At least not from the various Popular Mechanics debunking pieces. Alex Jones, for instance, tells us this:

I've talked to pilots who've had radio problems and F-16's fly up next to them. Everybody knows this, not just Maj. Douglas Martin the Public Affairs Officer. ...We have the public record, everybody knows this, this is public knowledge.

No names, no references, nothing you can check, you just have to take his word for it.

Peter Meyer uses the Douglas Martin quote, then quotes an email as supporting evidence:

...Here is the "Key" to unlock the door: The extensive flight logs for 20 years from the 3 military bases in the area and Port Authority responding to air threats is exemplary.

Thousands of sorties run in response to threats, practice runs, false alarms, done weekly or daily over 20 years....

This is a little better as the person making the quote is named, but again, you’re still basically just taking their word for it. (There’s a little more to the email and their argument, but we don’t want to reproduce the entire page here, so zip over to the above site and check it out for yourself. We’ll wait.)

On balance, then, the “intercepts are routine” claim is far from proven, at least in conjunction with intercepts over the continental US. And if there really were so many, then it seems a little odd there’s not more concrete, solid documentation to show it.

What’s more, even if we ignore Popular Mechanics and just consider the Douglas Martin quote, it’s far from clear as to what this actually means. Note that he was talking about the number of times jets were scrambled (and possibly diverted). Could some planes have been recalled soon afterwards, perhaps because radio contact had been re-established? Absolutely, scrambling is only the first step. We don't know how many actual intercepts actually took place.

Another complication is that in the first figure Martin refers to scrambling jets or diverting combat air patrols, while in the second he mentions scrambling only. Is the quote literally correct, or does the “67” figure also include combat patrols that were diverted to a particular target?

Regardless of that, it’s worth bearing in mind that intercepts may not always be successful.

...another federal official said that two years ago [in 2002], military jets could identify and intercept only about 40 percent of intruders in training drills.

Some claim intercepts always happened if planes travelled into restricted or prohibited areas, but this isn’t true at all. An FAA rule change from September 28th 2001 makes this clear.

WASHINGTON - The FAA today alerted civilian pilots of their responsibility to avoid restricted airspace and the procedures to follow if intercepted, in light of the Department of Defense announcement that pilots near or in restricted or prohibited airspace face a forced landing, or as a last resort, use of deadly force by military aircraft...

Earlier, pilots who flew in restricted or prohibited areas received a warning from Air Traffic Control and then faced suspension or revocation of their licenses or a fine. Now a pilot faces interception by military aircraft and then a forced landing at the first available airport. The Department of Defense has stated that deadly force will be used only as a last resort after all other means are exhausted.

So prior to 9/11 it seems that even flying in restricted or prohibited airspace wouldn’t necessarily result in an interception. This impression appears to be confirmed by a 1998 story of an American Airlines jet flying directly over the White House, which fails to mention NORAD, fighters or intercepts:

An American Airlines jetliner flew directly over the White House two months ago, through some of the country's most sensitive restricted airspace, apparently because of a mix-up at Reagan National Airport's radar control facility.

The July 16 incident presented no danger to President Clinton or anyone else on the ground or in the air, and the aircraft was flying high enough that likely no one even noticed, other than air traffic controllers, the pilots and the Secret Service.

But it was one of a rapidly increasing number of White House airspace violations, which have more than doubled each year since fiscal 1996, despite precautions taken after a small plane struck the White House in 1994. The trend has concerned the Secret Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, leading to new warnings to pilots and a recommendation by a task force to update maps and make other changes at National. The American Airlines incident alone apparently has prompted the FAA to consider changes in procedures for one National landing pattern.

I'm doing nothing more than demonstrating you have no desire to know the truth and wish to wallow in your paranoid delusional fantasies.

Please post my views on the 911 truth movement, i.e., my paranoid delusional fantasies on the subject, and provide a link to back up your claim.

What you state above is a knowing bald faced lie performed with the specific intent to smear.

By the way, if you can't control your temper, it is probably time to turn off the 'puter.

He already used the "anti-semitic website" canard, and not on any particular site. I posted a link to a search page with several results that backed up my position.

I think we know what kind of an asshole we are dealing with here. The difference is coc will always hide behind lies and the keyboard. I am a street brawler from way back and would not hesitate to kick his ass in a one on one. It would never happen. He is a pussy and will keep hiding.

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke

aristeides is right. you are imitating BAC again. you were warned about this yesterday. if you can't be original i WILL replace you with a new kook.

They all have the same Mossad/ADL/DOD/CIA issued "copy and paste" "rebuttals" on their hard drives.

I always used to wonder how BAC was able to produce those enormous tomes within seconds.

And you cannot give us a synopsis that we can check against the sources in the link and rip to shreds.

I have to assume he agrees with the twoofers since he automatically assumes anything rebutting them will ripped to shreds.

In one instance, he surmises that Cheney ordered the plane to be allowed to hit the Pentagon.

Then, in another he surmises that a plane didn't hit it at all. It was a missile.

Griffin has now written four books on 9/11. It's only natural that he should have altered his thinking over time.

Does this alleged contradiction exist in his latest book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking? Don't you think it's fair to press him on his views in his latest book? Maybe you should read it, instead of refusing to read it?